? I fear I must leave--no money, no
credit, and a heart of lead.

YOUR OWN OSCAR.

Oscar said that it was an expression of his tender admiration for Lord
Alfred Douglas.

"You have said," Mr. Carson went on, "that all the statements about
persons in the plea of justification were false. Do you still hold to
that assertion?"

"I do."

Mr. Carson then paused and looked at the Judge. Justice Collins
shuffled his papers together and announced that the cross-examination
would be continued on the morrow. As the Judge went out, all the
tongues in the court broke loose. Oscar was surrounded by friends
congratulating him and rejoicing.

I was not so happy and went away to think the matter out. I tried to
keep up my courage by recalling the humorous things Oscar had said
during the cross-examination. I recalled too the dull commonplaces of
Mr. Carson. I tried to persuade myself that it was all going on very
well. But in the back of my mind I realised that Oscar's answers,
characteristic and clever as many of them were, had not impressed the
jury, were indeed rather calculated to alienate them. He had taken the
purely artistic standpoint, had not attempted to go higher and reach a
synthesis which would conciliate the Philistine jurymen as well as the
thinking public, and the Judge.

Mr. Carson was in closer touch with the jury, being nearer their
intellectual level, and there was a terrible menace in his last words.
To-morrow, I said to myself, he will begin to examine about persons
and not books. He did not win on the literary question, but he was
right to bring it in. The passages he had quoted, and especially
Oscar's letters to Lord Alfred Douglas, had created a strong prejudice
in the minds of the jury. They ought not to have had this effect, I
thought, but they had. My contempt for Courts of law deepened: those
twelve jurymen were anything but the peers of the accused: how could
they judge him?

* * * * *

The second day of the trial was very different from the first. There
seemed to be a gloom over the Court. Oscar went into the box as if it
had been the dock; he had lost all his spring. Mr. Carson settled down
to the cross-examination with apparent zest. It was evident from his
mere manner that he was coming to what he regarded as the strong part
of his case. He began by examining Oscar as to his intimacy with a
person named Taylor.

"Has Taylor been to your house and